Sublime

—And who the fuck might you be? Hold up. This isn’t Osaka, and not every guy with a nice body and an icy gaze talks like he’s about to rip your head off. My prejudice had biased my imagination. On both sides.

Her speeches had two refrains: “I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna get big boobs,” and “Can I really go through with this?”

Makiko, the one visiting me today from Osaka, is my older sister. She’s thirty-nine and has a twelve-year-old daughter named Midoriko. She raised the girl herself. For a few years after I turned eighteen, I lived with them in an apartment back in Osaka, when Midoriko was just a baby. Makiko and her husband had split up while she was pregnant, and a

The whole town was ripe with salt and haunted by the action of the tides. At night it filled with boisterous drunk men.